Post-colonial theory: a paradigm of exclusion
Ko taku reo taku ohooho, ko taku reo taku mapihi mauria
My language is my awakening; my language is the window to my soul
Assimilate and exclude
‘Our values, beliefs and way of life were incrementally replaced with those of the colonisers’.
(New Zealand Waitangi Tribunal 2008 92).
European expansion has created a legacy of tragedy and agency around the world. For indigenous people, tragedy often supersedes agency as Europe’s encounters are commonly seen as a process of uninterrupted, inevitable and undifferentiated disaster for all indigenous people (Belich 2009). Aotearoa was no exception; imperialism and colonial settlement enacted practices such as plunder, warfare, genocide, enslavement and rebellion to acquire land and effectively displace tangata whenua, rendering them and their traditional knowledge invisible and subordinate to that of the colonisers (Polak 2005).
This chapter describes post-colonial theory as the theoretical discourse that underpins my approach to environmental development in Aotearoa. Firstly, it will outline the importance of exploring post-colonial theory to this study. Secondly, it will discuss the key post-colonial terms attributed to post-colonial theory, displaying its multiple meanings and interpretations, and this will lead into an exploration of the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. Thirdly, it will align key components of post-colonialism with the work of French theorist, Michel Foucault; this will further explain the state of indigenous people and knowledge systems within the current state of environmental development.
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Fourthly, mātauranga Māori is discussed and then compared to Western science, unearthing the core issue of incompatibility between the two approaches to resource use.
Theoretical basis
Environmental planning in Aotearoa/New Zealand is entrenched in the environmental regulatory regime of the Resource Management Act 1991 (“RMA”). The RMA provides the central framework for resource management and iwi environmental involvement. However, the manner in which Māori interests are incorporated is mainly determined by the courts. These interests relate to “Māori living in and working with their ancestral communities, and endeavouring to protect the integrity and life sustaining abilities of their lands and natural resources” (Mutu 2002 165). The RMA provides the framework for environmental management, but it also contributes to defining the parameters that restrict iwi environmental management. Furthermore, the events of the first part of this century such as the confiscation of the seabed and foreshore, the emergence of new technology such as genetic engineering, and the amendments to the RMA, have mirrored the acts of land confiscations and legislative suppression that occurred in the 19th and 20th centuries (Hutchings 2006). Numerous assessments have been carried out on the impact of the RMA on iwi kaitiaki interests. Also, “all of the assessments and decisions continue to uphold the assumed power basis of the colonial hegemony as the dominant worldview and system for managing the environment in Aotearoa” (Hutchings 2006 95).
Many environment planning theorists, such as Faludi (1973), believe that the rationale for planning theory is to promote human growth and continue the enrichment of human life. Faludi writes, “planning and science propel this process of man becoming master over his world and himself along a path towards further human growth” (Faludi 1973 35). It can be argued that this is the stance that the Government has in regards to resource management in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Western ideas of environmental management and domination, in the name of progress, often conflict with the views of indigenous people whose voices of environmental experience and traditional knowledge have been silenced or seen as inferior due to a past of colonisation, assimilation and exclusion.
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Aotearoa has two different sets of histories and knowledge; one of the original inhabitants – the tangata whenua, and the other of a settler population. A power struggle has arisen between the colonised and coloniser which is readily seen in the environmental domain. Issues of cultural knowledge, justice, redress and truth are central to this study in unearthing the nature of the power struggle over the ownership and management of natural resources. Post-colonial theory is employed to challenge the colonial dominance over environmental and water management. The work of French philosopher, Michel Foucault, is coupled with post-colonial theory to portray how the production and application of truth and knowledge depicts the bias amongst the portrayal and acceptance of knowledge.
Post-colonial terms
The term post-colonial theory or post-colonialism has a wide range of interpretations and applications. This term is closely associated with colonialism and imperialism, and in the context of Aotearoa/New Zealand it depicts a relationship between Pākehā as the colonizers and Māori as the colonized. The
Dictionary of Human Geography describes colonialism as “The establishment and
maintenance of rules, for an extended period of time, by a sovereign power over a subordinate and alien people that is separate from the ruling power” (Watts 2000 93). Imperialism is defined as “the creation and maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural and territorial relationship, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination” (Clayton 2009 373). Despite the definition above, Loomba criticizes definitions of colonialism as they very rarely make reference to encounters between peoples or of conquest and domination, but rather refer to settling in a ‘empty’, new, uninhabited country (Loomba 2005). Polak (2005) emphasises that the multiple interpretations and ambiguities of definitions of the prefix ‘post’ and the root ‘colonial’ in the term post-colonial, deliberately fail to mention the possibility of people already residing in countries prior to European settlement. Both Loomba’s and Polak’s assertions are in reference to the Oxford English Dictionary definition of colonialism:
a settlement in a new country…a body of people who settle in a new locality, forming a community subject to or still connected with their parent state; the community so formed, consisting of the original settlers
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and their descendants and successors, as long as the connection with the parent state is kept up
(Loomba 2005 7).
This definition avoids making any reference to people other than the colonizers during settlement. It implies that the colonizers created a settlement in a ‘new country’; this process of forming a community excludes indigenous people, legitimising their invisibility. Indigenous exclusion within the history of European settlement has had a continuous mark on human history. The transmission of a nation’s history often excludes its ‘bloody past’ and only acknowledges that settlement represented the formation of a primarily European community in a new country. Polak further explains that practices such as plunder, warfare, genocide and enslavement would not have been necessary “had the colonisers not had somebody to plunder, fight against, put to genocide or enslave” (Polak 2005 136). This process is reflected in contemporary times when settler populations fail to recognise the original inhabitants of a country and proclaim themselves to be ‘indigenous’ to the new land. This was exemplified when Labour MP, Trevor Mallard, ‘proudly’ claimed to be indigenous to New Zealand, challenging the “presumption about the way in which non-Māori feelings for land and water were dismissed as less heartfelt, less sensitive, less spiritual” (Misa 2008). Such actions reflect how colonialism did more than takeover a territory to “extract tribute, goods and wealth from the countries that [Western Europe] conquered”; it restructured economies, exploited labour and interfered with political and cultural structures of another people or nation (Loomba 2005 5).
Colonialism began with the European expansion in the 16th to 20th centuries; this was described as the exploration of the ‘new world’. European encounters with
indigenous people can be often characterised by the Christopher Columbus quote:
Uncivilised heathens could have no superior right to occupy the Lord’s holy Earth, regardless of how long they had lived in a particular place. A Christian nation could move in at any time and occupy the space needed by its own people… as such occupancy was essential to the process of bringing heathens into the saving knowledge of the new religion, which was born out of the Reformation (Harris 1953 63).
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Indigenous people encountered European contact all over the world, in different terrains and frontiers. No encounter was the same. In some areas indigenous people created trade with the initial settlers and allowed them to live among them, while in other encounters the indigenous people were massacred for their resources.
According to the Western world, colonisation was inevitable as it was the only path to modernism. “Colonisation invoked modernity’s triumph over so-called traditional society” (During 1998 1). Terms such as colonialism and imperialism refer to a linear time frame of progression from first contact, to colonisation and to then modernisation. McClintock (1992 85) describes the progression as “the passage [that] rehearses this temporal logic: progress through the ascending doors, from primitive pre-history, bereft of language and light, through the epic stages of colonialism, post-colonialism and enlightened hybridity6”. Throughout this progression indigenous people were enslaved, exterminated or forced to conform. On top of the suppression of colonisation, Pākehā-induced epidemics greatly affected the Māori population such that many Pākehā assumed that Māori would be extinct towards the turn of the century. Dr Featherston, the superintendent of Wellington stated:
“The Māoris are dying out and nothing can save them. Our plain duty as good compassionate colonists is to smooth their dying pillow. Then history will have nothing to reproach us with”
(Mikaere 2000 12).
While extinction did not occur, the spread of disease aided the colonisation and assimilation process, encouraging urbanisation and pledging allegiance to the Crown, or converting to Christianity in order to receive aid (Mikaere 2000). The devastating spread of disease was common amongst indigenous people worldwide; they had not experienced European disease until their arrival. The linear process of colonisation to modernity7 created nation states within these new colonies based on imperial control. Evelyn Stokes (1980) also illustrates this point in the
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Hybridity – The conceptual boundaries produced by dominant discourses that depend on diversions between the ‘other’ and the same; hybridity refers to those things and processes that transgress and displace such boundaries and in so doing produce something ontologically new.
7 Modernity and modern – occupy a central position within the discourse of Europeanism. Within
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colonisation of Aotearoa; “the only way that Māori people could hope to fully be acceptable to European settlers as fellow citizens was to assimilate to European culture…Māori progress was equated with Europeanization”. In the South Pacific the significant European explorer, Captain James Cook, is symbolised as a founding colonial ‘forefather’ for first ‘discovering’ the uninhabited islands of New Zealand and claiming them for his sovereign (Belshaw 2005). Colonialism sought to create a universal understanding of humanity by annihilating ‘otherness’ with assimilation and absorbing “the heterogeneous…; in short, to translate the other into the language of the same” (D'Hauteserre 2005 103).
As the new colonies of Europe grew and indigenous people were either exterminated or assimilated, these imperial colonies gradually developed into their own nation states and identities; McClintock describes this as a state of hybridity. Colonial and Anglo-Christian values remained the foundational values of these colonies, depicting and acknowledging only a colonial past and history of the nation (Maguire 1985). This reflects how those settlers believed that countries failed to have original or indigenous inhabitants, and justified how a nation’s history did not begin until the arrival of its colonial settler population. This system of nation building only produced images of European supremacy, but also institutionalised a “fabricated history, full of omissions and distorted perspectives” that for the majority of the New Zealand public, only stared in 1840 (Maguire 1985).
Colonialism, imperialism and modernism are vital in the creation and interpretation of post-colonial theory as it encompasses all these terms. An understanding of these terms and their application alludes to where post- colonialism sits in the modern context of indigenous societies, and within the hybrid state of colonial nations (McClintock 1992).
42 Post-colonial theory
Post-colonial theory encompasses all of the above terms and theories; however, its definition and interpretation has been widely contested. The obvious implication of this term is that it refers to a period after colonialism. Its most popular use arises in situations that examine the impact of the coloniser on the colonised and how this continues to the present day. The theory of post-colonialism became more crystallised when Said published Orientalism (1978); he described the idea of post-colonialism as ‘an examination of the impact and the continuing legacy of European conquest, colonisation and domination of non-European lands, peoples and cultures’ (Said 1978). The main argument of Orientalism is that people do not acquire knowledge about ‘others’ in an objective way; the manner in which the information is analysed and received is the end result of a process that reflects certain colonial interests. Said describes this as a lens that distorts the actual reality of other places and people. This lens is called Orientalism – a framework that is used to understand the unfamiliar and the strange, and is intended to make indigenous people appear different and threatening (Said 1978). This has led to the creation of modern day cultural and social stereotypes. The Dictionary of
Human Geography (2009) defines post-colonialism as:
A critical politico-intellectual formation that is centrally concerned with the impact of colonialism and its contestation on the cultures of both colonizing and colonized peoples in the past, and the reproduction and transformation of colonial relations and representations and practises in the present
(Gregory 2000 612).
There is debate as to when the post-colonial state arises; many assume that because descendants of the colonised are widely dispersed, the world is post- colonial, inferring that the term refers to the time after the ending of colonialism (Childs and Williams 1997). This is due to the prefix ‘post’ which implies an ‘aftermath’. However, Loomba (2005) asserts that “if the inequalities of colonial rule have not been erased, it is perhaps premature to proclaim the demise of colonialism” (Loomba 2005 7). As a result, decolonisation has not meant an end to unequal relationships or imperialism (D'Hauteserre 2005), but allows a country
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to claim post-colonial or independent status, while still remaining neo-colonial8. Polak (2005 137) believes that post-colonialism should be accepted in its plural form as it encompasses a set of “heterogeneous moments arising from very different historical processes”. This is also supported by During’s (1998) statement that “the post-colonial effect is specific to each ex-colony”. Most authors contend that post-colonial theory is a critique of Western structures; Evelyn Stokes notes that it “should constantly interrogate and apply self-re- flexibility to the creation of knowledge, and lead to rethinking of the very terms by which knowledge has been constructed” (D'Hauteserre 2005 105).
Post-colonial theory is used in this thesis as a method of analysis when I discuss various cultural, political and linguistic effects and experiences initiated by colonization (Polak 2005). More importantly, it demonstrates how past colonial discourses still exist in the post-colonial present, and opens “up a space to question the categories and epistemologies” that have supported Western structures of dominance (D'Hauteserre 2005 105). As displayed in Said’s literature, colonialism often discusses the interaction between the coloniser and the colonised. In the case of Aotearoa, the colonised is the original indigenous inhabitants, tangata whenua, and the coloniser is the invading European setter population. Colonised people within the post-colonial discourse are often described as the strange, different and threatening ‘other’ in the coloniser Western ‘norm’ of understanding (White 2005). This mind set embodies all the aspects of exclusion and marginalisation as defined above under the terms colonialism and imperialism.
In terms of New Zealand’s environmental planning, post-colonial theory analyses and addresses the fundamental theories that construct resource management and the mainstream decision making processes. Identities of Māori, the tangata whenua, and the dominating motives of the European settler population have been amalgamated into what is portrayed internationally as the nation state of New Zealand. This image produces images of racial equality; however, this is a misleading and tokenistic portrayal that only employs some aspects of Māori culture. Monda (2011 para. 6) comments how:
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Consequently, a loss of history and memory takes place, with the effect that the colonised indigenous is kept out of the objective conditions of contemporary nationality. Under these conditions identity easily becomes confused with an "artificial nostalgic folklore" unconnected to the times.
This is exemplified by the token provisions found in planning documents; they outline the significance of tangata whenua values and participation, but fail to practice these. Traditional values such as mauri, wairua, taniwha, tikanga and atua are often discussed in consent hearings and the Environment Court as iwi react to activities that threaten these values. However, these arguments are labelled as ‘myths’ and have little weight in comparison to stronger written sections of the RMA. Other examples include the exploits from tourism such as the ‘haka’ before rugby matches; this further promotes a false nation state in favour of economic gain. Māori knowledge, management and socio-economic conditions remain subordinate to that of the colonial oppressors, and this uneven relationship is often exposed in the environmental and resource management field. Such moves to portray a nation of equality are deliberately made by those in positions of power. The next section outlines these power relations, specifically Foucault’s work and how it uncovers how those in power deliberately manipulate knowledge to install realities of ‘truth’.
Foucault: the installing of what is true and false
Even after the initial conquest, processes of colonisation continue to enforce Western domination, power and control over countries and indigenous people. Forms of knowledge, language and values of the indigenous ‘other’ are made subordinate to those of the Western institutions; this is achieved by creating an environment which imposes the supremacy of Western knowledge. Aspects of indigenous culture that cannot immediately conform become decentred, marginalised and appropriated as the colonies assert their own discourses of history and knowledge. It is in this way that Western knowledge, science, language and institutions can dominate history and power structures (White 2005). Foucault explores the ideas of discourses and ‘truth of resemblance’; he discusses how knowledge that is perceived as truth is a product of power because it is employed in a way that regulates and normalises individuals. This is illustrated by
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the use of scientific principles, methods and reasons as the practices employed to create categories of understanding and what is deemed as acceptable truths. These truths are then justified by observations, accounts, testimonies, and confessions to the truth; this allows the knowledge to be established as ‘conditions’ which distinguish the ‘normal and healthy’ and what is rationally right and wrong. Foucault emphasizes that “madness doesn’t just exist – it is produced by disciplinary knowledge” (Danaher et al. 2000 26). In this example he explains how the government drafts policies and laws that determine who is legally normal and healthy, and who is morally or physically dangerous. Knowledge is based on